Copyright by Lisa Renee Foster 2006 The Dissertation Committee for Lisa Renee Foster Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Music, Publics, and Protest: The Cultivation of Democratic Nationalism in Post-9/11 America Committee: Dana Cloud, Supervisor Barry Brummett Richard Cherwitz Sharon Jarvis Mary Celeste Kearney Music, Publics, and Protest: The Cultivation of Democratic Nationalism in Post-9/11 America by Lisa Renee Foster, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2006 Dedication To tolerant and loving workers everywhere… Acknowledgements I owe the outcome of this process to the assistance of many people. My family, friends, mentors, and colleagues, have been invaluable assets to my personal and intellectual growth. I would like to thank first my advisor, Dana Cloud. Her questions have guided me, her commitments inspired me, and her love has kept me motivated to carry on my own curiosities. I am happy to forever call you my mentor and friend. I am also indebted to my committee: Barry Brummett, Rick Cherwitz, Sharon Jarvis, and Mary Celeste Kearney. All of these scholars have shown immense kindness to me, and in the process, spurred me to better and more interesting questions. In addition, I owe many thanks to Alan DeSantis, Rosa Eberly, Ron Greene, Susan Morgan and Tyler Harrison, for their mentoring advice and support. My colleagues and friends are an inherent component of the thoughts within this dissertation. I do believe that my questions emerge from a blending of their insight with my curiosities. Angela Aguayo, Kristen Hoerl, and Caroline Rankin have been my intellectual and interpersonal family. They, along with Jessica Moore, Katie Feyh, Tim Stephensmier, Andrew Glikman, Kevin Johnson, Jen Asenas, Jamie Doyle, and Amy Young have been an incredible system of support throughout this educational process. Their fielding of questions and concerns, coupled with sharing in the cycles of laughter, love, and pain, have been instrumental to the completion of this degree and dissertation. To my friends outside of the academy, your grounding in a reality that reminded me of my inspiration for this project has been priceless. I would like to thank Brandi Larkey, Andrea Mattingly-Williams, Nicole Sieber, Dana Gardner, and Rachel Wulbert v for their unfailing assistance in this endeavor. They continually contextualized my intellect in a context of love and friendship. I offer my immense gratitude to my family for their pride and joy. I have never been in want of understanding from them. To Mom (Margie), Dad (Joe), Joey, and Eva, I am so happy to have been able to foster my questions about the world in your presence. To my partner these past two years, Philip Crabtree, I thank him most for electing to love my questions about popular music and our civic selves enough to battle the perils of this process with me. Lastly, I would like to offer thanks to many helpful employers and workers that have made the completion of my degree possible. In Austin. TX, I am thankful to the Departments of Communication at the University of Texas and Austin Community College, A+ Student Staffing, Curras’ Restaurant, Waterloo Video, Sandra Ritz, and the UT Department for Student Financial Assistance for having graciously employed me or offered me assistant in times of need. I am equally grateful to the support offered by Michael Pfau and the Department of Communication at the University of Oklahoma for having had enough faith in my questions to employ me prior to the completion of this dissertation. Finally, to Cody Ingram and the workers at Starbucks in Norman, Oklahoma, Abraxas in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Belushi’s in London, England, my hearty thanks for keeping me happy, healthy, and fed while I wrote. I wish for all of you a lovely and insightful engagement with political popular music. vi Music, Publics, and Protest: The Cultivation of Democratic Nationalism in Post-9/11 America Publication No._____________ Lisa Renee Foster, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2006 Supervisor: Dana Cloud Since the events of September 11, 2001, national mourning has relegated the citizen’s responsibility to memorializing silence. The events of September 11, 2001 inaugurated a culture of mourning, erasing dissent from citizenship and relegating civic duty to the memorialization of silence. This project will consider how popular music was able to challenge such notions of citizenship through its abilities to tap into vernacular public spaces for the formation of counterpublic deliberation, democratic citizenship, and a public culture. Theories of the public sphere, nationalism, popular culture, and the rhetorical function of music highlight how popular music, in spite of its ideological baggage, creates a political identification that allows for the emergence of anti-war counterpublics to occupy space within the dominant public sphere, exemplifies how the textual circulation of dissenting ideas both create counterpublic spaces and demand critical rationality within them, and ultimately realigns the democratic citizen as the questioning citizen. Music is a rich multi-textual phenomenon that influences democratic vii deliberation. An investigation of this power is a significant contribution to critical rhetorical theory, as it offers insight as to how subordinated voices may access and shape dominant discourses via texts that are themselves the product of dominant-hegemonic systems. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Questioning the Role of Popular Music in Democratic Publics……………………………………………………………………....1 METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS OF MULTI-TEXTUAL ADDRESS………...9 TEXTUAL SELECTION AND CHAPTER PREVIEW…………………………………10 Chapter One: Popular Culture and the National Public…………………....15 RELATIONSHIP OF POPULAR CULTURE TO THE PUBLIC SPHERE………………..16 People and Popular Culture……………………………………………...17 Hegemony and Popular Agency…………………………………………19 POPULAR PARTICIPATION AND THE MEDIATED PUBLIC SPHERE………...……..23 Incorporating Multiple Publics and Vernacular Voices………………….24 Media’s Potential for Democratic Engagement………………………….26 MEDIATING THE POPULAR AND THE PUBLIC VIA NATIONALISM……………….28 NAVIGATING PUBLICS AND POPULAR CULTURE………………………………..31 Chapter Two: Selling Politics to the Masses……………………………….33 POPULAR MUSIC AS COMMODITY……………………………………………….36 Artistic Authenticity……………………………………………………...37 Innovation and Homogenization…………………………………………40 Technologies………………………………...…………………………...42 Consumption and Distribution…………………………………………...44 ATYPOLOGY OF POPULAR MUSIC AS RHETORIC……………………………….46 Public Address and Embodied Modality………………………………...47 Genre……………………………………………………………………..51 Sound and Context……………………………………………………….56 Political Persuasion and Social Change………………………………….63 PRODUCT AND PERSUASION OF POPULAR MUSIC………………………………66 ix Chapter Three: Woody Guthrie and Commodified Folk……………...…67 WOODY GUTHRIE,POPULAR AMERICAN FOLK, AND THE CULTIVATION OF CRITICAL RATIONALITY…………………………………………………………70 Authenticity and Genre…………………………………………………..71 Persuasion and Product…………………………………………………..74 Multivocality and Innovation………………………………………….…77 Publics and Technology………………………………………………….80 EMERGING INSURGENCY IN POPULAR MUSIC………………………………..…85 Chapter Four: Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising and the Power of National Unification Post-9/11……………………………………………………..89 POST 9/11 AMERICAN NATIONALIST DISCOURSE……………………………..91 NEGOTIATING THERAPEUTIC NATIONALISM IN U.S. COVERAGE OF THE RISING…………………………………………………………………………..93 Grief, Healing, Renewal………………………………..………………98 Unity and Community………………………………………………….101 Populist Appeals………………………………………………………..103 POPULISM AND COUNTERPUBLICITY…………………………………………..109 GAUGING DOMINANCE IN THE CULTIVATION OF DEMOCRATIC NATIONALISM…………………………………………………………………..112 Chapter Five: The Image of Steve Earle as Dissident Rebel and the Reformulation of Patriotism in the Public Sphere………………………..114 FROM MUSICAL NARRATIVE TO MEDIATED ARGUMENT……………………….116 Lyrical Ballad as Enthymematic Argument…………………………….117 Generic Signification…………………………………………………...118 Ideological Indictment………………………………………………….120 POPULAR NEWS AND THE BRANDING OF BALLAD AS ARGUMENT……………124 Freedom of Speech……………………………………………………..127 x Faith…………………………………………………………………….131 Patriotism Post 9/11…………………………………………………….133 DELIBERATIVE CITIZEN-CONSUMERS………………………………………….136 Positive Reviews………………………………………………………..138 Negative Reviews………………………………………………………143 IMAGE AND ACTION……………………………………………………………151 POPULAR INSURGENCY THROUGH POLITICAL CONTROVERSY………………..156 Chapter Six: Dissident Dixie Chicks and the Emergence of a Deliberative Public Culture……………………………………………………………..157 DEFINING PUBLIC CULTURE…………………………………………………...158 On Deliberative Instrumentality………………………………………..160 Distinguishing Public Culture from the Public Sphere…………………164 On the Nation…………………………………………………………...165 THE FORMATION OF PUBLIC CULTURE IN DIXIE CHICKS DISSENT……………168 Political Deliberations on the Economy of Popular Music……………..169 Reflecting Counterpublicity of Dixie Chicks Dissent………………….173 Invocation of Democratic Nationalism…………………………………180 Contextualization and Musical Argumentation………………………...190 THE CONTROVERSIAL POPULAR OF PUBLIC CULTURE………………….…….195 Conclusion: Music, Publics, and Protest………………………………….196 PUBLICS,POPULAR, AND PROTEST……………………………………………197 RETURNING TO IDEOLOGY,ARGUMENT, AND THE CIRCULATION OF DISCOURSE……………………………………………………………………..200